Todd Holmdahl: Xbox 360 Interview

ET: The demos that we’ve seen so far—the stuff on MTV, and that was running at the press conference last night and will be at the show—is that running on the actual final hardware? The three-core CPU and the final GPU, running at final clock speed?

TH: No that’s all running on Alpha Dev Kits.

ET: What is in an Alpha Dev Kit and how does it compare to the final hardware? We’ve heard it’s a two-CPU Power PC, not dual-core but two separate CPUs, and basically a 256MB Radeon X850.

TH: Right. The best way to look at it is that, well it depends on which functions you’re looking at, but in aggregate it’s probably 30-40% of what the final product can do.

ET: The final product will be at least twice as fast?

TH: Right.

ET: So all the stuff we’ve seen running so far Gears of War, Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, Test Drive, Need for Speed all that stuff was running on an Alpha kit that is that is half or less the final system’s power?

TH: Right, right. I mean different games are going to behave differently, but as a rough number, yeah.

ET: When do you plan to get to developers the final dev kits that have the real three-core CPU, the final GPU, the unified memory architecture, all that stuff?

TH: That process is happening now.

ET: So it’s sort of trickling out to developers as we speak, they’re getting their hands on them?

TH: It’s not really trickling I would say that the process is happening. We are actively engaged in making that happen.

ET: You could say that within the next couple of months, all the developers should have their hands on the final hardware and can begin running their games like it will run on the final Xbox 360, and optimizing for the architecture?

TH: Yeah, that’s a reasonable timeframe.

ET: The original Xbox was home to a lot of homebrew development that Microsoft didn’t really intend for. But that kind of thing has proven pretty popular, like with all the homebrew development happening around the PSP. Do you guys plan to embrace this notion more this time around, or is it too worrisome with Live always connected and the marketplace and so on?

TH: It’s very important to have a very secure system, and we’re making sure we have a secure system. It’s a very private system, very secure.

ET: Can you explain how you’re locking it down?

TH: We’re looking at it from a holistic standpoint, everything from servers to CPUs. We learned a lot from Xbox. We’ve architected the box to be very secure, and we started thinking about that from the ground up, and how to solve that problem holistically.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2016 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.